Today, I hope to give a little more detail on the findings from the report itself, in particular regional trends, and then give an international perspective also – or at least start to give one, which I think is always instructive. Below is a graph showing the quarter-on-quarter change in asking prices for the last two quarters, i.e. Q4 2008 and Q1 2009, in each county. The most obvious finding – probably not a surprise to anyone – is that asking prices fell in almost all counties in both quarters. A second clear finding is that there does not appear to have been one or two counties more affected in the last six months than elsewhere (although one could make the argument that Munster has got off relatively unscathed since September).

Quarter-on-quarter changes in house prices, 2008q4-2008q1

What also jumps out is that the two quarters saw very different patterns. In the final three months of 2008, a few counties – such as Galway, Westmeath and to a lesser extent Donegal and Leitrim – saw the largest downward adjustments in asking prices. Two counties, Mayo and Tipperary actually saw no fall in their asking prices. This quarter, Mayo and Tipperary actually had slightly larger falls than average – perhaps a sign that sellers there had been holding for the start of the year before acceding to the realities of the market. On the flip side, sellers in Galway and Westmeath believed in Q1 that their large adjustments in late 2008 did not need to be followed up with more adjustments straight away.

Sligo has been the worst hit county in terms of falling house prices, with a fall in the region of 10%in three months alone. (Dublin city centre and Waterford city actually saw bigger falls but they are lessened by other parts of their counties.) Aside from that, it seems that Dublin generally and the counties around it were among those with larger adjustments since the start of the year.

This leads on to perhaps a more interesting question – how have counties fared since their property prices peaked? To do that, I’ve set up another Manyeyes dataset (which anyone can access) with the percentage gap between house prices in a given quarter and the peak, for each county. Where a county is sandy coloured, that means it has peaked. The deeper the blue, the bigger the fall. (One little trick with these figures is that for a county’s earlier “blues”, prices are still going up. By the second row, that’s no longer an issue.)

Change in asking prices from the peak, 2007-2009

A couple of findings emerge, based interestingly on alternate axes of the country:

East peaked before west, on average, and by almost six months. If you draw a line from Cavan down to Wexford, 10 of the 13 counties peaked in the first half of 2008, more than half the country in population terms, including all of Dublin and its offshoots. Cork, Galway, Limerick and a few other counties actually peaked in the second half of 2007, while a couple of stragglers – Tipperary and Westmeath to be precise – only peaked in early 2008. (Interesting to note, in passing, their sellers’ totally different reactions to conditions in late 2008, as per the first chart above.)

North is falling faster than south, on average. If you draw a line from Dublin over to Galway, 9 of the 10 worst affected counties so far come from that half of the island. The top half of the property market – literally! – has been lopped off more than the bottom half. This means that the north-east – essentially Dublin-plus – fell first and is falling hardest, while the south-west – Munster – was last to fall and has fallen least so far. It will be interesting to compare these emerging trends, two years into the property crash, with the final statistics on Ireland’s property readjustment/crash/Armageddon/return to sanity/fill in name here.

Speaking of writing the history books, perhaps it’s no harm to have a quick look to our left and our right and see how other property markets are faring. Below is a chart of about 20 countries (with two different measures in there for the US, the first is the OFHEO measure, while US* is the Case-Shiller national index). I’ve based this on data posted on the Economist’s website, but have surreptitiously replaced the 2007/2008 ESRI data, about which there is a lot of scepticism currently, with daft.ie data. The bars show the annual rate of change in house prices, including a 1997-2008 average, and figures for 2007 and 2008. (As per the Economist website, some of the Q4 08 figures are actually Q3 08 while a couple, including Ireland, are Q1 09.)

International comparison of property markets, 1997-2009

Replacing the ESRI data with the daft.ie had the effect of moving Ireland from the “Club of Moderates” such as Denmark and the Netherlands, to the “Bleeding Edge” group with Hong Kong, the UK and the US (at least one measure for the US at any rate). I will do my best to try and track down the original data for this series so that a change-from-peak measure can be contructed as again that may be more instructive than a year-on-year change, particularly in six months time.

In the meantime, though, I’ll leave this up here and ask for any insights, comments or queries, as per usual! Fire away…

A little behind schedule, given that the report is out a couple of weeks at this stage, but the latest Manyeyes visualization of Ireland’s property market is up here. The overview snap is below.

Heat map of price changes in Ireland's property markets

As you can see, all counties have notched up two consecutive quarters of price falls by this stage (Limerick was last to fall). Some counties are now on six quarters. It seems that those that fell first have fallen hardest – in the Midlands (defined loosely enough), Laois and Longford were among the first counties to register falls in asking prices. They have now been joined by neighbouring counties, which are among the worst affected so far by falling prices. Take Donegal, for example, which was among the last to give up rising prices, where they are now 17% lower than a year ago. In Westmeath, the figure is even higher (18.1%), which marks a huge slide of more than 10% in the year-on-year change from the previous quarter. Longford and Louth are also in the same range close to 17%.

Now, as for Tipperary and Waterford (and Limerick and Mayo, the other two counties where falls are still single digits)… Are sellers there living in a mild form of cloud cuckoo land? Even looking at fall-from-peak figures, rather than year-on-year, they’re still in single digit territory. Or perhaps they think that they’re more sheltered, because the overhang of property is not as severe as it is in the Midlands/North-West? Answers on a postcard…

(PS. Do people think that this heatmap should change from year-on-year changes to one masuring the fall from the peak instead? That might give a better idea of total adjustment. Biggest adjustment so far is still Westmeath, down 20.0% exactly.)

As those who’ve checked out/had to put up with my many word clouds on various different topics from Wicklow genealogy to Barack Obama will testify, I’m always looking for new ways to present data and information. For those with similar interests, a useful tool in that regard is Manyeyes, a free data visualization service offered by IBM. First thing you might do when you click through is have a wander around some of its featured visualizations, such as the OECD economic outlook or the World Cup Finals.

You needn’t stop there, though, as once you’ve registered, you can upload datasets yourself and visualize them. What’s particularly cool, in my opinion, is the ability to do maps with subnational data points, e.g. for the USA, China and, somewhat surprisingly until you remember IBM’s presence in the country, Ireland.

So I plugged in some county-level statistics from the Daft.ie database, in particular the year-on-year % change in asking prices by county from the first quarter of 2007 to the third quarter of 2008. The results are available for all to see on Manyeyes – I haven’t been able to put a live visualization up here, but you can get a sneak preview below and indeed the whole shebang just by clicking on the picture.What, even clicking on the link is too much hassle? OK, here’s the lazyman’s version:

Heat-map of asking prices for Irish property, 2007/2008

The easiest way to get the overview of the story – but with the minimum detail and surprise factor – is to go straight from 2007-q1 to 2008-q3. As you can see the map goes from totally brown to totally blue! But that naturally is hiding a lot of detail… So here are some other highlights on regional trends in Ireland’s property market:

Sligo is a constant underperformer – having enjoyed some of the smallest increases in the first half of 2007, it’s now suffering from some of the largest falls in 2008

Aside from Sligo, West Leinster was the first region in the country to suffer from falling house prices, in year on year terms, with Longford and Laois falling in year-on-year terms by (and we can pretty much throw in Westmeath there too, where prices were no higher than a year previously, in the same quarter)

In late 2007, asking prices in south-east Leinster (e.g. Carlow,Kilkenny) and neighbouring Munster counties (Tipperary, Waterford) were still rising in year-on-year terms.

Limerick was the last bastion of rising house prices. It’s the only county not to have registered two consecutive quarters of year-on-year falls in house prices… yet!

Have a look at 2007-q4… poor old Donegal just doesn’t get it! Even in early 2008, it was still at it. In Q3 2008, though, with prices down over 11% compared to a year earlier, it’s landing with a bang.

There are just some initial observations on the figures – overall, Manyeyes is a pretty useful tool, I’d have to say. I’d be interested in hearing anyone else’s observations on regional differences in price trends. What have I missed? Or indeed, what should I be heat-mapping?